Fulford: Touring the ruins at the Museum of Broken Relationships

Even in this great age of museum-building, it took a special sense of irony to create an institution devoted to displaying the detritus of dead love affairs, the abandoned wedding dresses and forgotten gifts that once seemed to promise permanent romance.

Two ingenious curators in Zagreb, Croatia, have made a career for themselves with the Museum of Broken Relationships. It’s a public gallery for private sorrow, a site for exhibiting objects that symbolize failure in love. Their collection has toured to a dozen cities and inspired an annual exhibition in Winnipeg with a similar title, the Museum of Broken Hearts.

Everywhere you can find museums whose very existence seems unlikely. The Tassenmuseum Museum in a 17th-century Amsterdam canal house displays the world’s greatest collection of women’s handbags; it now has a competitor, the Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul. Several American museums venerate the history of barbed wire, such as the Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Tex.; connoisseurs claim barbed wire civilized the American West. In Arlington, Va., the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum sells DEA-labelled caps and displays items seized by agents, such as a diamond-encrusted handgun. The Shibuya district of Tokyo contains a handsome, four-storey Tobacco and Salt Museum. Last month New York opened the Museum of Mathematics, with a cute nickname, MoMath.

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Given that museums are mainly devoted to success in everything from politics to art, why not a museum that memorializes failure? Most of us know we must fail before we find success. Why shouldn’t failure, even personal and painful failure, be depicted graphically? The contents of the Zagreb museum are objects of revenge and consolation, evocative and often eccentric footnotes on love in our time. Rage is often part of the narrative.

In one gallery an axe hangs on the wall. The Berlin man who donated it says it recalls his first live-in girlfriend. A few months after they began living together, she informed him she had fallen in love with someone else. She then went on a holiday, leaving him with their place and her furniture. He bought an axe. Every day for two weeks he destroyed one piece of her furniture. “The more her room filled with chopped furniture acquiring the look of my soul, the better I felt.” He now considers an axe an instrument of therapy. Its title in the museum is Ex-Axe.

A teddy bear says, “I love you” on its chest beside a note that reads, “WHAT A LIE!”

This all started, appropriately, with a broken relationship. In 2003 Olinka Vištica, a film producer, and Dražen Grubišić, a sculptor, decided that their four-year love affair should end. Vištica recalls that they didn’t want their love to be remembered as something ugly since they believed it had been beautiful.

They thought of doing a project about it. The idea of a museum started as a joke and then began to seem possible. They asked friends to donate objects representing their break-ups, then solicited contributions from friends of friends, all contributions to be shown anonymously with brief explanatory texts. They tested their idea with an exhibition, then set up a neat little museum, complete with the Brokenships Café, for brooding. They began exhibiting their growing collection in various cities, including Berlin, Istanbul, London and (currently) Boulder.

Vištica and Grubišić have received an award from the European Museum Forum for “the most unusual, daring and, perhaps, controversial achievement that challenges common perceptions of the role of museums.”

The exhibits in Zagreb are often what you might expect, such as a set of keys donated because they “no longer bear any emotional significance to me, since my ex turned out to be a calculating bastard.” A teddy bear says, “I love you” on its chest beside a note that reads, “WHAT A LIE!” A good deal of originality crops up among the donations. A Slovenian donated a French identity card and wrote: “The only thing left of a great love was citizenship.” A set of handcuffs, with key, was donated, the cuffs wrapped in soft fabric, for comfort. One man donated a prosthetic foot. He lost his foot as a Croatian soldier in 1991. His lover, a social worker, helped him get a first-class prosthesis from Germany. In his note he said the limb lasted longer than the relationship because it was made of better materials.

Communication today is often digital, but participants in the museum reaffirm the emotional force of solid objects. One exception is a student who submitted a printout of an essay comparing a now-dead love affair to Serbia’s political position in the world. The Edge Gallery in Winnipeg has adopted this framework, giving proper credit to the Zagreb original, in its Museum of Broken Hearts. The second annual version of it was even more successful than the first and the curator, Claire Childs, is already talking about a third version next year. One possibility: Have a closing night at the exhibition where they burn the exhibits in a ritual fire symbolizing the refusal to live in the past (providing the donors didn’t want their objects back, of course).

People who first hear about the idea of donating romantic mementos assume that more women than men will take part, on the assumption that women are more romantic or perhaps more sensitive to love’s failures. But in Winnipeg, as in Zagreb, men and women are about equal in their willingness to display their emotions. Winnipeggers donated candles, roses and an old record player stocked with love songs. One woman contributed a cardigan she had been given by an ex-lover when they parted. She decided it was beautiful and warm, like him, but also temporary. And it was disintegrating, like her memories of their relationship.

One man, an artist, broken up by his divorce, invented what he called a “12-step program” of recovery. He drew a new self-portrait every day, noting his progress toward health. He turned up at the opening of the show, making his story no longer anonymous.

A graffiti artist wrote “Will you marry me” 100 times on a painting. Still, he feared his girlfriend would never say yes. So he painted an elephant over the words and explained to her that this made his painting the elephant in the room. He was right. She finally turned him down. But his metaphor-made-almost-literal became the perfect exhibit in the Museum of Broken Hearts.